Consider The Blobfish

You can find all sorts of weird stuff underwater.

This was something that occurred to me one evening when undermining my attempts to limit social media use by doomscrolling into oblivion. Someone (I don’t remember who) shared an image that I’d seen before. It was of a weird, gelatinous creature that looked like the face of a sad middle aged man, which had begun to collapse in on itself. You know the one.

This is a blobfish. I, like the majority of people who have seen this image, made the reasonable assumption that this fish was extraordinarily ugly. Indeed, as of 2013 it’s officially “the world’s ugliest animal”. But this Instagram post alerted me to a harsh reality: the blobfish doesn’t look nearly so much like an alcohol-soaked cadaver in its natural environment, thousands of feet below sea level. In fact, what makes it look so terrible in that photo is a human rapidly extracting it from the depths, subjecting it to a change in pressure so radical that its squishy flesh simply can’t cope. Our decision to bring blobfishes up to the surface causes them to bloat into unseemly scowls.

This struck me as fertile territory for further Steve Zissou-esque exploration. We have an archetypical ugly duckling, spurned for the way it looks, when it is really something else entirely (in that example, the “duckling” is in fact a swan). The blobfish transforms when it is ripped from its natural environment and is then criticised for its repulsive appearance, despite this judgement being totally unreasonable, not to mention cruel. 

Meanwhile in the depths, its low density flesh and sacks of air allow it to propel itself across the sea floor while expending minimal energy—and it looks nothing like the bloated images with which it is commonly associated. The Smithsonian has a great write up if you want to know more.

This journey of discovery took me back to one of my favourite slices of reflection from bandana aficionado and author David Foster Wallace—his “This is Water” commencement speech to the graduates of Kenyon College. 

Quickly, for those who are unfamiliar with the talk, here’s the gist of the story DFW uses: an old fish remarks to a pair of younger fish, “Morning boys, how’s the water?”, to which they reply “What’s water?” The point is that the younger fish are failing to recognise the most obvious realities that underpin their lived experience; this anecdote is used to illustrate of the dangers of falling into a solipsistic “default setting”, in which we fail to recognise the vibrant interior lives experienced by others, instead believing that the world revolves around us. 

I’ve written about “This is Water” once before, relating it to both the attention spans of goldfish and preconceptions of millennials, but looking back that post relied too heavily on LinkedIn buzzwordiness, especially given DFW’s more sincere approach to the subject matter. When considering the plight of the blobfish, I figured this deep sea punching bag could fit within the same extended cinematic universe of Foster Wallace’s beautifully understated anecdote (let’s call it the DFWCU), and hopefully build on the ideas raised in “This is Water” more constructively.

So, not only do we sometimes fail to recognise some of the most pressing realities in our lives—that “this is water”—but we also go out of our way to ridicule things that do not conform with the way we see the world. In the case of the blobfish, we apply totally unrealistic beauty standards to images of a creature that’s in the process of dying, far from its home. By not taking the time to do our homework and understand something, we inadvertently underestimate it.

The atmosphere on the surface world certainly has its pressures: contemporary culture blindly places a premium on conspicuous consumption, performative hard work, and certain physical characteristics. We are constantly reminded of the beauty standards we should be aspiring to, the kind of homes we should live in, and the most “valuable” ways to spend our time. Sure, the internet has nurtured a plethora of thriving subcultures, but there is still a hegemonic standard against which we find ourselves measured.

All this can have devastating implications for our wellbeing and mental health. A survey conducted by the Mental Health Foundation and YouGov in 2019 found that over a third of UK adults felt anxious or depressed because of their body image and one in eight experienced suicidal thoughts for the same reason. Meanwhile, the WHO recognised “burn-out” stemming from chronic stress and exhaustion as an “occupational phenomenon” in the same year—chasing a notion of success can lead to breakdown. 

The most important thing we can learn from the blobfish is that we shouldn’t default to making judgements based on our personal or societal preconceptions of what “good” looks like. You may excel in a certain context, while someone else is in their element four thousand feet below sea level. That’s fine. We each find our own way of thriving, and trying to conform to certain twisted criteria can end up with fantastic beings, like the blobfish, collapsing under the pressure.

This is water—and there are plenty of different places to swim.